Feedback Focus

I remember trying these techniques in the sister course last semester, so I thought it would be interesting to see if my ranking of them would change. For the most part, it didn't, but it was still kind of funny to go back and compare.

Reading out loud is one of those techniques that sounds like it should be great, but it's never really worked out for me. For some reason, I find myself focusing more on the sound of my voice instead of what I'm reading—probably because I've never liked my delivery when reading prose. I'm not great with inflection, and it tends to distract me.

I do love the copy-and-paste technique, though, and I've always used a variation of it even before I learned about it here. I like it because I think better on paper anyways, and when I have the source material right there in front of me, I can skip down to a new paragraph underneath to put down all my stray thoughts; if I need to reference anything, the original is right there for easy access. It also helps me make sure I've addressed everything I want to address. It also helps me to take notes as I go, which I prefer, because otherwise I may get distracted by the time I get to the end and forget to make certain points.

As for the timer approach, I'd rank it somewhere between the other two in terms of usefulness. I do see some perks to it, unlike the "reading aloud" approach, because it did give me plenty of flexibility and time in which to read the story and get my thoughts together. The element of time itself was a little distracting, though, since I kept glancing at my time budget while I was reading the story, and then ended up with more time than I needed afterwards and felt like I was killing time waiting. It may be more useful if I have a longer reading selection I want to break up into chunks, though, or a list of shorter articles/stories/etc. to read through, so I'll keep it in mind for future reference.




Image Credit: Temporal Distance (Hourglass) by moritz320. Source: Pixabay.